Fun fact: Paris was founded around 225 BC.

... so they've come to Slashdot to recruit volunteers; very resourceful of them. :)

This is completely stupid. There can't be a copyright violation obviously.

or as Max Planck wrote "Aus nichts läßt sich nichts folgern." - No conclusion can be drawn from nothing.

Thanksfully the Max Planck society supported the Berlin Declaration on Open Access.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Fascinating, when could we read the scroll?

There are also lots of artefacts from the last century lost. Video games from the 1980s.

One could recreate music by optical 3D scanning shellac records and combining different prints to eliminate the noise. The quality gets better. Just image a new scan of Metropolis negative with current technology Or Robert Johnson even better than in the Centennial edition..

ICE carbecues are somewhere between 20 and 400 times more likely, depending on how (and when) it's measured. For instance, the 400x figure comes from measuring per-mile-driven, not just fleet sizes. Meaning... (numbers for example only) if you had 10 EVs and 100 ICEs and in a year only one of each burned, you'd conclude ICE were safer because 1% is better than 10%. But what if the EVs each drove 200,000 miles that year while the the ICE cars each drove 200 miles. Suddenly the real-world frequency would flip the interpretation of the results.

Point is... you can capitalize SCARY WORDS to MAKE PEOPLE WORRIED but pretty much everywhere you go to get the facts, it turns out BEVs are INSANELY SAFER.

Here's one for you. Are Catholic priests more - or less - likely to molest children than non-priests? Seems like every time you hear about some inappropriate touching that doesn't involve a sitting president or his friends, it's about a priest, right? Only... that's what you hear about. And that's what you notice because it confirms a pattern of what you've heard in the past instead of refuting it. It's what you remember. But wait... why does the press pick those stories? Do they hate the church? No. It's just that when a reporter is given two options... a story about a priest and a story about an accountant, they'll pick the story about the priest because it draws attention... because it tweaks their statistical bias too. Turns out it's dramatically, absurdly worse to let your kids be around their own family than a priest, if your goal is to protect them. But facts are hard. Confirmation bias is strong. Cognitive dissonance is real and it hurts.

So hey, statistically-speaking, with regards to vehicle fires, EV cars are way, way less likely to harm anyone than ICE cars. Any "but factor X" in the mix is just printing a priest story; misleading regardless of truth.

I didn't say PC hardware isn't good enough, I said there's no point buying compromise hardware that's not what you really wanted, because in the long run it's all pretty damn affordable. If an Intel or AMD box is what you prefer, by all means buy one and enjoy!

One thing I want out of my hardware is the ability to run my OS of choice without a lot of hassle, and since my OS of choice is MacOS, that kind of narrows down the field for me.

I imagine it's pretty mediocre, but I don't know and I don't particularly care, because I don't spend much time playing video games anymore. If I was a gamer I'd likely buy a different machine for that.

Sigh. Ontogeny is NOT evolution. It is not the same thing as having a low MHC diversity due to a genetic bottleneck as well as lacking tens of thousands of years of evolution to a pathogen. Not the same at all. It's silly to even suggest that. Epigenetic shifts in an individual do not create new HLA genes.

Consider COVID. Novel bat coronavirus, nobody had preexisting immunity. Did everybody die? No. Because we had high HLA/MHC diversity, making it easier to target SARS-COV-2 epitopes. Native Americans lacked this diversity. It left them ill prepared for novel pathogens.

Also, you seem to believe that any disease you've never encountered before is fundamentally dangerous to an adult. That's simply not the case. Rhinovirus is intrinsically mild. It's an upper respiratory infection; it's not adapted to lower respiratory or systemic infection. It's not ebola. It's not going to become like ebola just because you've never caught it before. If a rhinovirus strain was reintroduced after 200 years after having been eradicated, we'd all get a cold, but by and large, we'd be fine.

And what would happen if Yamagata reappeared? We'd just add it back to our flu vaccines. Furthermore, the reintroduction of Yamagata wouldn't be catastrophic without that. You do not have to catch every Influenza B lineage at all, let alone every year. If you had been infected with B/Victoria and you were exposed to B/Yamagata, you'd have little sterilizing immunity against it - you'd very likely catch it. But your past exposure to B/Victoria is still greatly protective against hospitalization and death; B and T immunity against NA and the HA stem and stalk are conserved.

And this is about whether or not to catch every lineage. Well guess what, even with air filtration, that's still going to happen. Air filtration only has a meaningful impact for people at a distance, not people close together. It's about protecting the person across the room, not the person you're standing 50 centimetres away from. What it does change is how often you catch them. And if lineages or whole viruses go extinct, that's great. Worrying about some sort of reintroduction 200 years later is just inventing your own unrealistic misery when we have actual pandemic threats to worry about.

Are computer purchases not consensual? Nobody is forcing you to buy overpriced RAM if you don't want to, so the rape analogy doesn't work.

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

I'm an Apple fan; I'm typing this on a 2018 Mac Mini that I spent roughly $2K on -- but it's 2026 and that Mac is still running just great. That works out to an amortized cost of about 68 cents per day -- which is to say, negligible compared to my other expenses.

Trying to save money by buying cheap computer hardware is like trying to save money by buying single-ply toilet paper -- you can do it, sure, but why make your life noticeably worse when the amount of money you'll save is trivial?

So...

1} Aside from some Teslas, there's nothing preventing an EV driver from getting out of a car that wouldn't also prevent an ICE driver.
2} Basically nobody extinguishes an ICE fire either.
3} ICE are more prone to burning than EVs are.
4} Just as EV SUVs exist, ICE sedans exist. The height of the hood isn't tied to powerplant.
5} Dashcams typically point out of the vehicle and rarely record audio (though many can).

To be fair, there's (to my knowledge) no evidence that driving a larger vehicle causes distracted driving. While it's nice to imagine that's the case, it'd have to be studied. As much as I'd like to assume drivers of those massive vehicles are less attentive drivers, we don't know that's the case. Anecdotes don't count.

I guess I should be more obvious with the sarcasm in the future ;)

Fact check / Analyze (post is in response to an article about a new program to install better air purification systems):

Sigh, need an edit button. :P (But yes, it would be nice if more people actually cared about ensuring the accuracy of what they write and would do that before spouting off scientifically ignorant statements. I rather wish browsers had a "fact check" text box would flag in red any factually questionable statements the poster is making, with a mouseover note explaining what's wrong, with references)

"âoe" - what are you pasting from? Google Search AI? ;)

Naive vaccine approaches do struggle with long-term sterilizing immunity against fast-mutating viruses like influenza, COVID, rhinoviruses, etc (but non-sterilizing immunity from vaccines is actually quite effective at preventing the worst consequences!). Which is why new techniques are being developed to cause the body to target evolutionary-conserved regions of the pathogens rather than the "immunologically easy" (immunodominant) epitopes like COVID's RBM, influenza's hemagglutinin's globular head, and such. These regions are easy for the immune system to "see" and target, but at the same time, the virus is also evolved to be able to shuffle them easily, so you need vaccines designed to train the immune system to attack the parts that the virus can't readily change without breaking things. Some include things like having the vaccine present a large number of very different RBDs at once (making it easier to develop immunity by attacking the evolutionary-conserved regions instead), glycan masking the variable regions, and so forth.